The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and do not constitute prior art.
Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together stepped ahead of the existing MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263 standard methods to develop a better and more excellent video compression technology. The standard is called H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and was released simultaneously as MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC and ITU-T Recommendation H.264.
H.264/AVC (hereinafter referred to as ‘H.264’) standard performs an intra and/or inter prediction process by the unit of macroblock having different shapes of subblocks to generate a residual signal. A 4×4 pixels subblock level frequency conversion unit of the generated residual signal is then encoded through processes including a frequency transform, quantization, entropy encoding.
Recent video compression technologies are under development to meet the demand for ultra high resolution videos, and the international standard organizations of MPEG and VCEG are jointly developing an HEVC video encoding standard by the name of JCT. The inventor(s) has noted that, other than typical 4×4 pixels and 8×8 pixels frequency units often used in known video compression technologies, larger frequency conversion units such as 16×16 pixels are of great help to improve the video compression efficiency. However, the inventor(s) has experienced a single complete scanning over such a 16×16 block by the known method causes difficulty in devising and implementing an efficient frequency coefficient encoding method and apparatus depending on the video characteristics.